Dagens ord

23 juli 2016

Some celebrate our biologically maladaptive behaviors without hoping for collective control of evolution. They accept that future evolution will select for preferences different from theirs, but they still want to act on the preferences they have for as long as they have them. These people have embraced a role as temporary dreamtime exceptions to a larger pattern of history.

(p. 26)

Seen up close and honestly, I expect the future to look like most places: mundane, uninspiring, and morally ambiguous, with grand hopes and justifications often masking lives of quiet desperation. Of course, lives of quiet desperation can still be worth living.

The model that Burke had in mind was, of course, the English system of government, which, rather than having been created from scratch through the adoption of a written constitution (in the Enlightenment style), was the result of parliamentary conventions, royal prerogatives, and judicial rulings, as well as laws and treaties, adopted and modified over the course of centuries. While offering exemplary stability, the British system is not obviously inferior to any of the constitutions produced through intentional design. Indeed, it remains the most widely copied system of democratic governance in the world (far more so than the American, which no one has ever seen fit to copy, and which Americans themselves do not even try to reproduce after having brought about "regime change" in other countries).

"propaganda must ... always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals."

Historically, it has been the left that is rationalist and the right antirationalist. "Reason" and "progress" somehow just seem to go together. [...] Even Karl Marx, who was inclined to view the claim to rationality of the first Enlightenment as nothing more than bourgeois ideology, nevertheless drew heavily on the authority of science in order to distinguish his "scientific" socialism from the "utopian" versions peddled by, among others, Owen and Fourier. Much of what Marx disliked about capitalism was simply the disorder of an unplanned economy. George Orwell was certainly not wrong when he observed that "the underlying motive of many Socialists ... is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard."

What has become clear is that if we let our culture drift, its tendency will be to drift away from rationality. Keeping it on track will require conscious awareness, intervention, and guidance. And yet the constituency most likely to achieve this - the progressive left, those with an interest in using the powers of the mind to improve the human condition - has been hit by a crisis of confidence of unparallelled proportions. The left has not only failed to defend reason against its critics and against the hazardous dynamics within the culture that threaten its supremacy, it has in many cases actively contributed to its decline. Much of this is due to the association of reason with science, science with technology, and technology with warfare, environmental degradation, patriarchy, alienation, and a variety of other ailments. Another large part is due to the explicitly antirationalist ideologies that came out of the 1960s, which were inclined to treat any system of rule-following as inherently oppressive. The final element stems from the utopian impulse and the desire to find revolutionary solutions to social problems, which generates impatience with the slow, steady, uncertain attempts at progress that are all reason has to offer.

Yet while left-wing antirationalism has been virulent, it is also, I would suggest, on the verge of burning itself out. This is because the left, in one form or another, has always been committed to the idea of progress, and progress has always depended on the exercise of reason. Most of the social and economic problems in our society are complex problems that require both ingenuity and collective action to resolve. None of this will happen if we simply follow our gut feelings. Solving collective problems require rational insight. Furthermore, the most important institution when it comes to resolving these problems is the state. Thus there is an almost inevitable connection between left-wing politics, support for government, and a commitment to the use of reason to improve the human condition.

The notion, still widespread today, that Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naïve belief in man's perfectibility seems to be a complete myth conjured up by early twentieth-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims. In reality, Enlightenment progress breathed a vivid awareness of the great difficulty of spreading toleration, curbing religious fanaticism, and otherwise ameliorating human organization, orderliness, and the general state of health and was always impressively empirically based. Its relative optimism rested on man's obviously growing capacity to create wealth, invent technologies capable of raising production, and devise stable legal and political institutions, as well as, it should be mentioned, the disappearance of the plague. Despite the slowness of our steps, urged the baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), one of the most radical of the philosophes, at the close of his Systéme social (1773), the evidence shows, without question, that human reason does progress. We are manifestly less ignorant, barbarous, and ferocious than our fathers and they in turn were less ignorant than their predecessors. Doubtless in times when ignorance and superstition are very strong there is little disposition to accept the light of reason. But who can deny, he demanded, that its resistance has significantly lessened in recent times?

Between these two opposed conceptions obviously no compromise or half-way position was ever possible, either theoretically or practically. Throughout the Enlightenment's history it is this irresolvable duality - rooted in the metaphysical dichotomy of one-substance doctrine (Spinozistic monism) and two-substance dualism, the latter as upheld by John Locke (1632-1704) and Voltaire, as well as other providential Deists and (most) Christians and Jews - that was always the principal and overriding factor shaping its course.

Thus, while in the last two or three decades scholars have mostly fastened their attention on national or confessional differences between shades of the Enlightenment in different parts of Europe, embracing the "family-of-enlightenments" idea developed by John Pocock (a notion still widely in vogue today) such an approach is largely inapplicable to the Enlightenment's most basic and far-reaching questions and controversies. For the "family-of-enlightenments" concept deflects attention from the most fundamental disputed points of thought, morality, and social action, among them the scope of reason, the possibility or impossibility of miracles, and the status of divine Providence, as well as the place of ecclesiastical authority and the split for or against democracy, equality, a free press, and separation of church and state. For all these were essentially either/or questions. Either history is infused by divine providence or it is not, either one endorses a society of ranks or embraces equality, one approves representative democracy or opposes it. On these questions it was the polarization, the division of opinion, that shaped developments.

Beyond a certain level there were and could be only two Enlightenments - moderate (two-substance) Enlightenment, on the one hand, postulating a balance between reason and tradition and broadly supporting the status quo, and on the other, Radical (one-substance) Enlightenment conflating body and mind into one, reducing God and nature to the same thing, excluding all miracles and spirits, separate from bodies, and invoking reason as the sole guide in human life, jettisoning tradition. [...]

"Radical Enlightenment" cannot in any way simply be equated with "atheism," or, still more vaguely, with free-thinking or with libertinism or irreligion. As many contemporary critics stressed, the sort of ideas diffused by Diderot, d'Holbach, and their disciples in the 1770s and 1780s had an essentially "Spinozist" philosophical underpinning in that they envisaged philosophical reason as the only guide in human life, sought to base theories about society on the principle of equality, and separated philosophy, science, and morality entirely from theology, grounding morality (as Boyle notably also did, but Hume, equally notably, refused to do) on secular criteria alone and especially the principle of equality. Radical Enlightenment was further quintessentially defined by its insistence on full freedom of thought, expression, and the press, and by identifying democracy as the best form of government, features again specifically Spinozistic and in no way Hobbesian or, in the latter case, Humean. Neither did radical thought ever have anything concretely to do with Locke and still less (despite the continuing efforts of some to argue this) with the English Commonwealth tradition of Freemasonry. Without classifying radical thought as a Spinozistic tendency, combining one-substance doctrine with democracy and a purely secular moral philosophy based on equality, the basic mechanics of eighteenth-century controversy, thought, and polemics cannot be grasped.